Instead of opening each file with their own respective application, this feature is really a great time saver for those who just want to have – well – a quick look.

But defining this feature as merely ‘peeking’ is an understatement of its ability. Quick Look for Mac is able to display a wide range of file formats, from simple text to keynote presentations to movies; and is also accessible from within many native Mac OS X applications like Mail, Time Machine, and Trash(!).

Beyond the spacebar

There are a few ‘unused by most’ nifty things that you can do by utilizing Quick Look abilities, such as:

1. View Before Restore/Delete

As mentioned above, you can use Quick Look inside the Trash and Time Machine. I find this ability most useful when I about to bring some files back from the (near) dead. Without Quick Look on your Mac, there’s no way to know the content of the file that you want to restore (or in some case, to completely delete).

2. View Pictures As Slideshow

If you select several pictures in the finder instead of one and hit the spacebar, you’ll have the additional option at the Quick Look pane to view the items as a slideshow. But you can jump directly into the full-screen slideshow by using the key combination of Command + Option + Y.

3. Using Index Sheet To View Multiple Images

Still on the subject of selecting multiple images and using Quick Look to view them, you could also view all the images in one sheet by clicking the Index Sheet button.

4. Quick Zoom

You can zoom the image viewed by Quick Look by clicking the image while holding the Option key (to zoom in) or Option + Shift key (to zoom out).

5. Navigate Between Files

This one should be obvious but it’s possible that some of the users miss it – like I did. When you open a file with Quick Look in Finder, you can move between files by using the Up and Down arrow key.

6. Overcoming The Filetype Limitation

As powerful as it is, there are still many file formats unsupported to be looked quickly. For example, Quick Look cannot play flash movies or show you the content of a folder. User will only get an icon with some information about that file/folder.

But users can overcome some of these filetype limitations by adding Quick Look Mac plugins. There are lots of options that you can find in the QLPlugins page from plugins for viewing Mobipocket eBooks files to Adobe Illustrator files. The ones that I find most useful are: Zip File Viewer, Folder Viewer, Flash Video Viewer and QuickChm. Different users will find different plugins to fit their individual needs.

Here are the steps to activate the plugins:

• first, download and uncompress the plugin files.
• then put the “.qlgenerator” files inside the ~/Library/QuickLook folder
• restart the Finder by executing this command line using Terminal: killall Finder

Similarly, you can uninstall any Quick Look plugin by deleting the files inside the QuickLook folder and restarting the Finder.

Here’s the display of the Quick Look view of a folder after installing the Folder Viewer plugin:

Do you have other Quick Look Mac tips and tricks? Please share them using the comments below.

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Problem

While in these games, the regular function keys can only be invoked by holding the Fn button and the function key together. Most of the time, I miss and nothing happens (although my screen does become dimmer). Basically, it’s annoying.

Other than that, some people with chubby fingers might not appreciate that the media control keys (F7, F8, F9) are not only small but located so closely together. Even with the slender fingers that I have, I sometimes hit “Next” instead of “Pause”.

Solution

FunctionFlip is a pretty cool preference pane that will allow you to easily to “flip” these media control keys or brightness control keys back to the regular function keys. Basically using this app you can switch Mac function keys to perform different actions. You can turn special keys back to regular F-keys, or vice-versa.

FunctionFlip appears in System Preferences under the ‘Other’ section. You are able to decide exactly which keys you want flipped. But before that, make sure that you have ‘Enable access for assistive devices’ checked under Universal Access in System Preferences.

The special functions are still available after the keys are flipped – to invoke them, you’ll need to press the Fn button and the corresponding F-key together. Simple, right? It also works if you have a recent external Apple keyboard with the media control keys. FunctionFlip lets you set which keys to flip on each keyboard individually.

FunctionFlip is listed to work with MacBook, MacBook Pro, iBook, PowerBooks and external Apple keyboards. The author didn’t mention anything about MacBook Air but it is a safe assumption that it will work with Air too. If you’re having difficulty with a certain keyboard, the author welcomes inquiries.

FunctionFlip is Universal Binary and requires Leopard. Grab it here.

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In my opinion, Stacks isn’t as bad as most people make it seem. I’ve found several useful reasons to keep it around, one of which is detailed here: Use Stacks To Save Websites For Later Reading.

After a bit of brainstorming, I managed to find a few more good uses for Stacks. Some of them may not be new tricks but I’d like to share them with you anyway.

Mail Attachments Stack

For those of you who use Apple Mail as the default mail application, this may actually come in useful for you. You can create a Stack to show all of your recent mail attachments.

Here’s how it works: every time you use Quick Look to preview mail attachments or directly open them by double-clicking on the attachment, they are automatically stored in ~/Library/Mail Downloads/

Simply drag the Mail Downloads folder to the Stacks section of the Dock and let go.

You may be overwhelmed by the thousands of attachments you have in there. It’s a good idea to arrange it by ‘Date Created’ and display it as Fan or List view so that you’ll know which are the latest attachments.

Any attachments which aren’t previewed with Quick Look or opened directly in Mail or instead, saved to the ‘Downloads’ folder will not show up in this folder.

Recent Applications/Documents/Servers Stack

This is a Terminal trick to make a Recent stack show up in the Dock. If you take a look at the Appearance preferences (System Preferences ->Appearance), you’ll notice a section which lets you determine the number of recent applications, documents and servers to display. This will generate a list located in the menu bar, click on the Apple icon -> Recent Items.

This is what you’ll need to do if you want that list to appear as a stack. Open Terminal (located in the Utilities folder or just Spotlight for it) and copy and paste these 2 lines of commands individually:

defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add ‘{ “tile-data” = { “list-type” = 1; }; “tile-type” = “recents-tile”; }’

killall Dock

After the Dock relaunches, the Recent Items stack will appear.

Right-click on the stack and there is a contextual menu which will allow you to display the recent documents or servers instead.

The ‘Favorite Items’ stack doesn’t really work in Leopard – it merely displays the ‘Places’ section of the Finder sidebar. If you want to display your favorite items…

A Favorites Stack

A Favorites stack is basically a stack of anything which you add to the Favorites folder. This function is not unavailable in Leopard, it’s just slightly harder to find.

The old ‘Control-Option-Click’ shortcut to make an item a Favorite doesn’t work in Leopard. Instead, what you need to do is click on an item to select it, click on the File menu, press and hold the Shift key and click ‘Add to Favourites’. Or select an item and press Command-Shift-T.

The shortcuts/aliases are stored in ~/Library/Favorites/. Drag that folder to the Stacks section in the Dock to make your Favorites stack.

Preferences Stack

By making a Preferences stack, it’s possible to shave a few seconds off your navigating time. It’s not very difficult to make this stack. I’ll just need to explain something: the preference panes you see in System Preferences are located in various folders. Also, it’s not necessary to add all the preference panes to the Stack. For instance, I hardly ever go to the Speech preference pane so I can exclude that from the Stack.

To make this stack, create a folder called Preferences and place it in your Home folder.

Open a new Finder window and go to System/Library/PreferencePanes. Command-click on the preferences you want to add to your stack, then Command-Option-click and drag them to the Preferences folder in the other Finder window. You should end up with a folder of aliases to the preference panes.

These are only the default preferences from Mac OS X. The other preference panes for example Perian or Flip4Mac WMV are located at ~/Library/PreferencePanes. Repeat same procedure to put their aliases into the Preference folder you’ve created.

Once you’re done, drag the Preferences folder to the Stacks section of the Dock.

Stacks as actual drop boxes

By creating stacks for the Public Folder located in your Home folder; and the Public folder in the Dropbox folder (not applicable if you don’t use Dropbox), you can literally create drop boxes as dumping grounds for everything you want to share with others.

Drag-and-drop anything into these stacks and they’re automatically shared within your LAN or through the internet (in the case of Dropbox). To find out how to set up sharing within your local area network, take a look at this Macnifying OS X article.

Are there any other useful Stacks tips you’d like to share with our readers? Let us know in the comments.

Got Tech Questions? Ask Them on MakeUseOf Answers!

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When you open the xMod application, you will see a window with several option panes at the top.

Under the Tools pane, there is a one-click button for you to check SMART status of your disks. For those who are not sure what SMART status is, it refers to the Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology that is built into your Mac’s hard drive to constantly monitor its condition. Frequent checks of the SMART status can allow you to predict and/or prevent disk failures.

You can also repair files permission and verify Preferences files in the Tools pane.

In the Finder pane, there is a great list of stuff that you can tweak, ranging from the default behavior in the Finder window to screen capture file type and save location. You can also change the menubar to a white background (just like in Mac Tiger) or give it a textured look.

One tweak that amazed me is the ability to set your screensaver as your desktop wallpaper. If you like to see a dynamic effect on your desktop, then you will definitely like this tweak.

The Dock pane allows you to change the behavior of your dock. If you prefer the old 2D dock in Mac Tiger or want to lock up some of the dock options (such as the position of the dock, dock content, autohide option) so that other people cannot change it, then this is the place to tweak it. If you don’t like the dashboard, you can also disable it here.

Both the Safari and the Clean panes contain tweaks for the Safari browser. The Safari pane allows you to enable the “Inspect Element” and debugging options while the Clean pane provides a one-click clean up of all your Web history.

The iTunes pane is a newly added feature in the latest version 1.5. It allows you to change the play count of selected songs and also remove dead tracks if there are any.

On the whole, I would recommend xMod to anyone who wants to get more out of their Mac Leopard and/or looking for ways to get thing done faster. It didn’t take long for xMod to become one of my ‘must-have’ applications in Mac. What about you?

xMod is free and can be downloaded from Geek Peak Software.

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